Actually, this is it.

Photo by Finn Semmer

It rained hard yesterday, and indentations from the temporary streams and rivulets still mark the sand near the chicken coop and throughout the bare sacrificial areas of the horse pastures. There’s a cool, dry breeze despite the fact that it’s late July in Florida — a breeze brushes my skin so deliciously and rustles the leaves of the palm trees, gently lifts Pippi’s feathers away from her otherwise sleek layers of down. She’s a real sweetheart — so I sit down in the cool, damp sand, and she jumps onto my arm, balancing perfectly while I give her kisses on her soft head and talk to her. About nothing really, just the early morning ramblings of a mind that’s had nowhere to escape to recently.

It’s something about the lighter weather that frees the mind to see what’s directly in front of it, that can help piece the words together into coherent thoughts. The oppressive humidity has a tendency to weigh down the brain, its stickiness like a heavy mud that you have to slog through to make sense of everything. Clouds covering the sun somehow loosen the cogs that have been gummed up in the glaring sun, which wilts the leaves on the plants and literally melts any material not built to withstand the scorching rays.

Free to sit still and meander in my thoughts, I replay the vivid dreams and nightmares I’ve had recently. Water, rushing. Massive boat-capsizing waves. Floods. Swollen rivers overflowing banks. Wildfires. Explosions. There seems to be one conclusive message emerging from all the varied manifestations of my sleeping mind: I’m in the middle of cataclysmic changes. Not just in my own life, but I’m also standing in the middle of a world that feels like it’s rapidly spinning out of orbit, barely tethered to the realities of life we once relied on.

The images of disaster spin on an endless mental carousel as the cicadas buzz and the chickens make their happy noises. I watch them chase butterflies and grasshoppers and eat the seeds off the grass that shoots up taller with each rain. The contrast between what’s in my mind and what I’m observing in real life is almost ridiculous in its starkness.

Anyone who read my last post knows that lately I’ve been questioning nearly everything about my life. Where do I belong? What am I supposed to be doing? Who, really, am I supposed to be? All the while, straining against limitations imposed onto me by circumstances: feeling trapped into certain roles (traditional domestic roles, specifically), unable to sense the freedom to choose and affect my own path.

I had breakfast with one of my best friends from my old city life last weekend and she described dealing with similar feelings, and she told me that she had a thought as she was wandering the beach collecting sand dollars: maybe this is it. Not in a nihilistic, negative way, but in that way where the soul suddenly sets aside the struggle and sees life for what it truly is. Maybe this — walking the beach, helping guide a baby sea turtle to the ocean (which she got to do — so cool) — maybe this is the kind of stuff that it is all about. Maybe it’s not searching for purpose within a career or trying to find our place within extractive capitalism. Maybe it’s not figuring out a word or a title to assign ourselves, planning the journey, pinpointing a goal or achieving anything we originally set out to do. Maybe this — the living, the everyday existing, the being on a journey that we cannot name and must concede that we cannot fully control — this is everything real and everything that matters.

I’m a goal-oriented millennial woman. I bought wholesale into the idea of being a “career woman”. I never planned to stay home with my kids at any point. Farming was not something I saw in the cards for myself. Until last year, I always had a sense of where I was going, what I was doing and who I was trying to be — all things that were not what I am now. The rug got pulled out from under me and I’ve been flailing, trying to fight the current and get back to recognizable shores. But those shores don’t exist anymore. I don’t know what my ultimate plan is; I’ve lost all sense of having a long-term path. Forget the 5-year plan: I barely even have a 1-year plan at this point. And that’s a terrifying feeling for someone that always lived her life so sure of the next step towards an ultimate lifetime goal.

But certainty was always an illusion. I was once seduced by LinkedIn-speak, the idea of a self-determined future that includes ladders and salaries and resumes and a plan. What I’ve discovered is that reality is much more like my nightmares of rushing water: you can either let go of the branches and allow yourself to follow the flow, or you can keep fighting against the current to try to get back to a shore that has long since washed away.

At the end of one of my dreams, I emerged from a storm at sea to find pilings just under the surface of the water in the harbor. They were placed at a perfect distance from each other to serve as stepping stones, and I realized that though I didn’t know where they led to, they were the obvious path towards a distant, unseen shore away from the wreckage behind me.

I awoke before I took the first step.